Texecom makes a nice range of alarm systems called Premier Elite, with products suited for everything from high-end domestic up to large commercial deployments. The range includes two IP-based communicator modules for wired (Com-IP) or wireless (Com-WiFi) operation.

Normally these communicators would be used with Texecom’s own alarm receiving service, or with a paid-for third-party monitoring service using proprietary software. I wanted to have a way to integrate the alarm with my own monitoring infrastructure, and with some other IoT projects I’ve got going on, so I spent some time reverse engineering the protocol.

I’ve been promising for years to put the source for my FPGA retro-computing bits up on GitHub. Well I’ve finally gone and done it.

These are essentially just the 2011 releases that are already available for download from here, but with the full development history intact. I know that others have been doing some excellent work based on both of these projects, both in terms of adding new features and porting to other boards. If anyone feels like forking and patching in their changes I will gladly accept pull requests in order to keep things together.

In the past I have bemoaned the resource requirements and closed nature of “standard” RF protocols such as ZigBee and other 802.15.4 based specs. In the meantime low-cost radio modules like the RFM12B, RFM22B and the newer RFM69 series (all from HopeRF) have started to become the radios of choice in open source Internet of Things projects. The problem is that despite a tendency towards standards like MQTT and HTTP on the Internet side, there does not seem to have been any attempt to standardise on what goes over the air, leaving a situation where everyone uses the same radios but nothing can actually interoperate.

Tiny Home Area Network (TinyHAN) is an attempt to address this in the form of an Apache licensed, highly portable protocol suite for resource constrained embedded systems using cheap sub-GHz radio hardware. The software is written in portable C and uses a layered approach to enable interoperability even between devices using different radios. This initial release of the suite supports basic client/server topologies currently without security, but with authentication and encryption to be added in the near future. Various examples are included, as well as a GnuRadio based sniffing tool that can be used with an RTL-SDR dongle.

The WG2 long-range balloon flight is now over as far as being able to track it is concerned; it is quite likely still in the air somewhere over Russia, however (as of 27/6/14).

The flight performed much better than we expected for a first try, covering a known distance of 1500 miles, to finally go out of ground-station range over Ukraine about 31 hours after launch. During the flight the balloon passed through a total of 8 countries (some more than once).

The balloon’s telemetry signal was received across Europe by a network of volunteers (many of whom are amateur radio operators), and fed into the central Habitat system operated by the UK High Altitude Society (UKHAS). This enabled the flight to be seen in real-time through the spacenear.us site.

At the time contact was lost the balloon and the tracking electronics remained in good health, with the battery expected to last perhaps a further 8 to 10 hours. Long-range flight predictions from the last known point suggest that the balloon will, if it remains airborne, travel up into Russia and then continue East towards Siberia.

Today sees the first flight of my tiny ARM based GPS tracker. The balloon (a 36″ Qualatex foil) was launched from Wirral Grammar School for Girls with their Astronomy Club, who were responsible for the successful WGGS1 high-altitude launch last October.

This flight is a float attempt, and can be tracked at spacenear.us with the callsign WG2. Calculations suggest the battery (a single AAA) should be good until about Friday morning.

The tracker, shown in the picture (more here), has the connector piece removed once programmed. For scale, the board is the same length as the AAA that powers it. Wire antennas were used for both GPS and downlink, and these were just soldered straight to the board. Total mass is about 12 g including the battery. Technical details of the tracker follow…

Laurent Mitnik has ported my FPGA Sinclair Spectrum to the Terasic DE2-70 board, and has very kindly allowed me to publish his changes. The port is based on the 200110901 release from the Downloads page.

I don’t have a DE2-70 on which to test this, but Laurent provided the screenshot to the right showing his board running Monty On The Run.

You can download the port from here for now, with the longer term plan being to move the source for both onto Github (when I have some time to convert the existing SVN repo).

The last few months I have been providing engineering assistance to Wirral Grammar School for Girls in their project to launch a helium balloon into the stratosphere. This first chapter of the project was brought to a stunning conclusion yesterday when we successfully launched and recovered a camera payload, lifting it to a final altitude of 35.5 km (116500 ft).

Telemetry from the balloon was transmitted back to the ground using a pair of trackers made from a modified version of my sensor boards. The two trackers were configured on different bands using a 433 MHz and 868 MHz RFM22B module respectively, and custom firmware was written to communicate with a uBlox GPS receiver and transmit coordinates via 50 baud RTTY. The primary downlink was on 434.3 MHz and was received as far away as Belgium and The Netherlands (thanks to all who helped out).

The downlink was received and decoded in real time from a chase car, with a rough landing site being obtained before the signal was finally lost. Initial indications placed the landing worryingly close to a quarry, although a search with a 7 element yagi turned up an extremely weak signal which was enough to give us a bearing to follow – it turned out to be a further mile and a half away and behind a ridge, which is pretty good going for a 10 mW transmitter lying on the ground. A short drive further and another wave of the yagi yielded a GPS fix which turned out to be 50 yards into a field about a mile further down the same farm track. Recovery was quickly affected by DFing the 868 MHz tracker for the final few meters using the much more portable yagi we had for this band. The camera was still snapping, and had shot over 1300 images.

Many thanks to everyone on #highaltitude on Freenode IRC for their valuable advice, and especially to those involved in the provision of the tools at habhub.org and spacenear.us.

Update 25/10/2013: Some images from the flight are now available on the new gallery

There’s no shortage of good Software Defined Radio (SDR) apps for RTL2382-based dongles, but wouldn’t it be nice if they could be driven remotely? WebRadio is a project I have been working on which aims to be a fully functional SDR with a user interface that runs in a browser.

The front-end is separated cleanly from the signal processing server by a (fairly) RESTful JSON API, so alternative GUIs are also an option (smartphone apps being the obvious one).

A key feature of the design is server-side decoding of data modes. Since the original impetus for WebRadio was my involvement with a local school’s high altitude balloon project, initial focus will be on making it decode RTTY, but the modular design makes it easy to add other decoders.

Currently the project builds and runs on a Linux PC, but with only basic functionality (tuning for a single receiver and selection of AM and FM). Channel filtering also needs some improvement, after which SSB will work as well – this is next on the list. The GUI is known to work properly in Chrome; for other browsers, for now, YMMV. Take a look.

The TI MSP430 Launchpad is a cheap MSP430 development board – about £3 when they first came out, although a bit more now. I think mine was a freebie from a distie. Although I quite like the MSP430 I do tend to use either AVR or some kind of ARM for most of my projects, so it hasn’t really seen much use.

The built-in emulator consists of a TUSB3410 and an MSP430F1612, pre-programmed with TI’s own MSP430 “FET” debugger. My aim here is to end up with a debugger that I can use with TI’s CC1110 chips used in the Ciseco SRF. The GoodFET project can talk to these using its Chipcon module, and this has at some point in the past been made to run on the Launchpad.

For many microcontroller projects requiring accurate temperature sensing the sensor of choice is the Maxim DS18B20. Although this has a specified absolute accuracy of +/- 0.5°C, it has several drawbacks, not least of which is its relatively high cost. For my prototype sensors I incorporated a TI TMP112, which is an I2C device with a minimum operating voltage of 1.4 V, making it particularly attractive for battery powered applications. My preferred option for cost-reduction, however, has always been to use a cheap thermistor with the microcontroller’s built-in analogue to digital converter (ADC).

This post discusses the evaluation of a thermistor-based technique for small embedded systems capable of achieving uncalibrated temperature accuracy to rival expensive digital sensors. An experimental comparison of various sensors over temperature is then introduced.

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